Why male privilege denial holds back progress on equality

When I joined advertising in the year 2000, I thought we had equality in the workplace. After all, a lot of the agencies had women in powerful roles. Either as second-in-commands or as key pillars of mainstay accounts.

No one could point a finger at an agency and accuse them of discrimination. Didn’t they hold key positions? Didn’t they drink whiskey and cuss and swear just like men? Didn’t they hold sway over careers and the futures of brands? That’s equality right there. What glass ceiling? What discrimination? Pshaw!

But that is the nature of privilege. The inherent inability to see the flaw in the system from the eyes of the privileged. Us men. We had only learnt not to see it. But it peeped out in conversations that were held in passing, around the cigarette break area, just as you brushed past another in a corridor, or in the car park or at the agency watering hole.

Despite visible progress, true gender equality in advertising remains elusive—not because women aren’t in the room, but because men still control which rooms they’re allowed into. George Koshy writes about how it’s time to move beyond tokenism and use privilege to create real, lasting change.

Download The Pulse’s Superwomen edition to read the full article.

 

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